Daft Punk album fails to live up to the hype

Bernard Zuel

Thanks to a huge marketing push, which included the official ''release party'' of the album in Wee Waa and the ''surprise'' availability of the album on iTunes several days before its official release, most people would probably assume that Daft Punk's new album is one of the biggest - and best - things of the year. This despite being made by two Frenchmen whose faces have never been seen and whose biggest hits were a decade ago when their appropriation of disco and a dusting of irony as tools for modern electronic dance music swept many of us up.

Almost inevitably, Random Access Memories fails to justify the hype. Well, to be fair, about a third of it fails, but that's enough to trip you up as you listen and move about to the duo - Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter - tapping into a few of their favourite things, from Giorgio Moroder's organised disco to 1970s soft pop, from oddball indie-pop chap Panda Bear to lots of Nile Rogers.

The album's strengths and weaknesses can be seen in a couple of key examples, beginning with the two tracks featuring vocalist-producer Pharrell Williams and Rogers.

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On the first single, Get Lucky, which became the most-played song in a single day in Spotify's history, Williams gleefully rides on a buoyant rhythm that has as much strut as Stayin' Alive and makes as little sense, though that hardly matters. Yet Lose Yourself to Dance, with Rogers re-creating one of those Chic choppy dance guitar riffs, feels more like pastiche, and that strut now becomes more of an amble.

Likewise, the unfathomably appealing Giorgio by Moroder, where the original Euro-disco production king talks us through his career while Daft Punk set up an extended twirly, synth-driven, Moroder-esque soundtrack behind him for nine minutes, feels rich and rewarding and makes you move. But Touch, with a frail-sounding Paul Williams (who wrote We've Only Just Begun and Rainbow Connection), aims for grandly romantic but instead plods for an unnecessary eight minutes without ever really making you feel anything.

Daft Punk tap into a few of their favourite things on their latest release, Random Access Memories. Photo: Supplied

Without guests, the instrumentals Beyond (part easy jazz-funk, part almost Vangelis soundscape) and Motherboard (Euro ambience and night grooves) seem out of place at first - though they are all the more interesting for that.

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Wait a couple of songs and they both seem like the perfect entree for the rolling-with-punch final number Contact, which begins with sampled astronaut voices and church organ, continues with a Daft Punk signature keyboard motif and a coating of '80s dance psychedelia in its drums before building to a noisy climax.